Donald Rodney
Courtesy of the Estate of Donald Rodney
Copyright: C. Hardcastle, 1993.

Donald Rodney's work is being shown in the Goodison Room at Tate Britain from 20 September to the end of December. This display marks Tate Archive’s acquisition of Donald Rodney’s papers, an extraordinarily diverse collection of sketchbooks, correspondence, audio-visual material, and printed ephemera documenting the artist’s work from the early 1980s.

This digital resource enables you to explore three of Donald Rodney’s forty-eight sketchbooks. Conceived as works of art, these sketchbooks were the artist's main creative outlet during long periods of hospitalisation. They were given to Tate Archive in 2004.

These three sketchbooks were made during the 1980s, when Rodney was exploring the nature of black identity and using representations of the diseased body as a metaphor for contemporary British society.

This site also includes an illustrated timeline, a series of interviews given by people who knew the artist personally and a bibliography related to postcolonialism and black art theory.